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Take monthly with water August 2017 7
Letter of the month
The Editor ’s choice for letter of the month will
receive a 28" Yachtsman’s Waterproof Bag.
Made from tough double
coated PVC fabric with
seams sewn and tape
welded the Burke bag is
100% waterproof.
This month’s prize goes to
Peter Mitchell,
from Gladesville, NSW.
Letters
Got Something to Say?
letters: AFLOAT
PO BOX 709 WILLOUGHBY 2068
email: info@afloat.com.au
web forum: www.afloat.com.au
Please keep your letters short. Letters longer than 250 words are
liable to sub-editing at the Editor ’s discretion.
It’s not all plastics – what really lies
at the bottom of the Harbour
There may be a tiny positive side to your plastic trash editorial
(Afloat Jun’17). Drop a coring tube over the side into the deeper part
of Sydney Harbour and guess what you’ll find in the sediment?
The top layer has plenty of plastic and fine particles of rubber
(from car tyres delivered by stormwater drains), on analysis it
gives very high values of zinc and lead.
A few centimetres down the plastics are replaced by aluminium
ring pulls, a little deeper brown glass is common.
The next 20cms is black mud packed with clinker and ash
deposited in the era of steam ships. Analysis is likely to produce
high trace levels of arsenic, beryllium, selenium, chromium and
mercury. At about one metre you’ll find clean muds with no
evidence of human pollutants.
This sequence is found all over the globe and in geologic time
it will become a key stratum in sedimentary rocks, analogous
to the global iridium anomaly much loved by geologists. This
thin clay layer marking the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
was formed when an asteroid or comet impacted the Earth
65 million years ago. Some 75% of all species, including the
dinosaurs vanished.
Are we the dinosaurs depositing our own extinction trace
in oceanic sediments and who or what will be around to read it
in 65 million years?
Peter Mitchell,
Gladesville, NSW.
Is your surveyor insured?
I have been around boats all my life, and have cruised or raced
yachts for about 40 years or so. Hence I have had dealings with
marine surveyors for a fairly long time. I had always assumed
that marine surveyors – like most professionals providing expert
advice and services to their clients – must all carry professional
indemnity insurance in case they make mistakes (as we all do)
and their clients suffer accordingly.
Apparently this is not so. There appears to be no legal
obligation on Marine Surveyors to carry Indemnity insurance
... a nd some don’t.
I am representing the former client of just such a marine
surveyor. The client engaged the surveyor to survey a $300,000
timber yacht the client was considering buying in Melbourne.
On the strength of the survey provided, the client bought the
yacht. It was later brought to Sydney. Serious structural problems
became apparent, and the yacht was inspected by first one then
another senior marine surveyor in Sydney – both of whom say
that the structural issues should have been found when the first
pre-purchase survey was done. The repairs to date have already
cost over $100,000 and are far from finished. The client would
not have bought the yacht had he known this.
When contacted, the original surveyor, through his lawyer,
has said that neither the surveyor nor the company he uses
to run his consultancy surveying business carry professional
indemnity insurance. So the client has no choice but to either
sue the surveyor and his company in the courts or “wear” losses
which will go well past $100,000.
The moral appears to be: always ask your surveyor to provide
you with proof of the currency of their professional indemnity
insurance before you engage them to survey a boat for you,